Then I Found $5 (and needed your help)

So we’re doing a portfolio exchange in my typesetting class and I was regretfully absent the day they voted on the topic for the portfolio, “then I found $5.” I need to make a piece that involves that phrase or is a response to it.

This is where you guys come in. I have two questions for you:

1. What were you doing before you found $5?

2. What did you do with that $5?

Your responses can be as ridiculous or as mundane as you like. Example 1: I was skydiving with Johnny Utah, we landed in a lake in the middle of the mountains. Then, I found $5 floating on the water and hired a boat to take me to shore. Example 2: I was doing the laundry when I found a soggy $5 bill at the bottom of the washing machine. I deposited it into my savings account to watch the interest grow! Or whatever direction you feel like taking the phrase, “then I found $5.” I will then use your responses in the piece I am making. This is handset type, so long responses are not ideal in this situation. Also, the dimensions are small (12.25″ x 5.25″) so space is limited. I would like to use everyone’s, assuming you come up with something. Each participant will get credit and a print.

Thanks for your help and I look forward to seeing what you come up with!!

Also, forget about what people will do for a dollar, what would they do for five dollars?

Here’s a knock off of Thomas Pynchon and a lipogram in honor or Georges Perec.

1) Upon my return home from a dinner party where the hostess had used rather too much brandy in the fondue I opened a letter from my archnemesis to read that she had been named executrix of her aging great uncle’s vast fortune and now had the funds to complete project Arcturus before the first snows of winter. The letter fell from my trembling hands and then, when I stooped to retrieve it, I found five dollars – Lincoln’s steady gaze mocking me from the note. To quench my anger I cursed the long dead president then tore the bill in eight pieces and closed my eyes and tried to feel as drunk as possible. This didn’t help.

2) I sat on the sofa for over an hour as a friend finished a note. It fell to the floor as she erased an error. I stood and retrieved the sheet and then, I found five dollars. I handed it over to her. She nestled it inside the letter, addressed it to her sister, and sent it out.

My senior year of high school, I took a couple of community college classes. I was (in my own memory) adored by all of my professors, since I came to each class with the enthusiasm and wide-eyed wonder of a gullible teen (a lot of the other students didn’t approach class the same way…)* Anyhow, at the end of one semester, a professor in one class decided that it would be a good idea to throw me a ‘graduation party’ because I was almost done with high school. So someone brought in a cake and balloons, and when I walked into class the next day the pomp and circumstance marches were playing on a portable stereo. The professor even dressed up in full academic regalia.** It was an extremely nice gesture, but at the time I was kind of uncomfortable standing in front of an entire classroom of mostly strangers while someone bestowed upon me a homemade diploma. Someone even passed around a card for everybody to sign. (I got a bunch of comments to the effect of ”I don’t know you, but you seem like a nice enough guy…”). It all had a great ending, though – when I opened up the card after the ceremony I found five dollars inside!

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*I think some of the other students were also impressed with my childlike awe of ‘real-life college classes’. People I had never met before kept offering me drugs – one time on a coffee break when I was in the bathroom a guy at the urinal next to me even offered to let me smoke a bowl with him. Basically there were a lot of people I was trying to avoid. There was another guy who had a strange facial tick where he would give a quick nod every couple of seconds when he was talking to me. This freaked me out, since I always thought he was motioning to something behind me. So whenever he would talk to me I would always be turning around and looking around me.

**There was an awkward moment here when I thought I was supposed to put on the gown/hood/bonnet